"Amazon’s Kindle e-readers with built-in 3G will begin to lose the ability to connect to the internet on their own in the US in December, according to an email sent to customers on Wednesday. The change is due to mobile carriers transitioning from older 2G and 3G networking technology to newer 4G and 5G networks. For older Kindles without Wi-Fi, this change could mean not connecting to the internet at all."
TheVerge purposefully left that out of the headline for clickbait. It's really not hard to write "Amazon's Older 2G/3G Kindles" or "Lose Their Cellular Connections"
I know that with many publications, the journalists don't get to pick their own headlines. There has been a lot of talk about how journalism is dead, but I have found that often, the article is well done, but the headline paints an inaccurate or divisive picture. I think the editors and maybe the MBAs are more of a problem than the journalists.
For customers with Kindle (1st Generation), Amazon is offering a free Kindle Oasis (10th Generation) device and cover.
Customers with Kindle (1st and 2nd Generation), Kindle DX (2nd Generation), and Kindle Keyboard (3rd Generation) can receive $70 off a new Kindle Paperwhite or Kindle Oasis, plus $25 in ebook credits.
Customers with Kindle Touch (4th Generation), Kindle Paperwhite (5th Generation, 6th Generation, and 7th Generation), Kindle Voyage (7th Generation), and Kindle Oasis (8th Generation) can receive $50 off a new Kindle Paperwhite or Kindle Oasis, plus $15 in ebook credits.
I’m not familiar with their product line but from reading just this comment I would guess that old devices that lose connectivity get a full new device and devices with WiFi losing partial connectivity get coupons and credit for their inconvenience (caused out of Amazons hands through the carriers)
That sounds like a fair deal to me. Although it’s pure speculation. I haven’t checked if that is actually the case.
That would make sense, but it's not in fact the case, many second-gen Kindles don't have wifi.
...I'm actually quite confused as to why the people with the oldest devices—whose Kindles presumably had the longest usable life—are the only ones getting free replacements.
> I'm actually quite confused as to why the people with the oldest devices—whose Kindles presumably had the longest usable life—are the only ones getting free replacements.
Maybe there is a lifetime clause in the AGBs? If they promised 15 years of usable time (for example), this might be their way to get out.
Also, the longest customers are probably the most loyal and bought a lot of books over the years, while also being the smallest subgroup.
Getting a $250 device and cover for a device first sold in 2007 is pretty great, honestly. Even getting $50 off a Kindle and $15 credit is a pretty good option, all things considered.
This is a tremendous deal. Makes me so confident in buying first gen Amazon products. The Oasis is their high end reader. I have one and it’s better than the normal kindles by far.
Doesn't "Kindle (1st and 2nd Generation)" include "Kindle (1st Generation)"? Getting a new device is a pretty nice gesture though I guess very few still have a working 1st generation Kindle.
Rarely have I ever seen a serious tutorial or guide be so wrong on so many levels. I was flabbergasted, entertained and felt pity at the same time. Truly a train wreck of a video, would strongly recommend watching.
No, just one of their people making a video showing "how to build a custom gaming PC" and ... not doing a particularly good job of it. After a few days of mocking they took the video down, and then a while later made sure everyone remembered again by copyright-striking some Youtubers that had made reaction videos using material from the original video. "the verge PC build" on youtube should find stuff.
I think a lot depends on whether you actually had one of those early generation kindles or not. I saw the headline and figured it was about WhisperSync and guessed it was probably due to sunsetting of the cellular networks and not Amazon turning off a feature to get people to upgrade.
Seems like a good opportunity to ask: what are some news agencies that do not use deliberately misleading headlines? For the blizzard thread, Bloomberg was the only article I saw linked with an accurate title
The default Kindle models did not have WiFi for several years. That cost an extra $30-50 or so.
I remember thinking at the time that hacking these would make nice sensors to deploy in the field and that they could stay online for free, essentially. Kindle had a built-in web browser, so HTTP calls wouldn't be too hard to make.
Controversial HN opinion: ten years ago everyone would be up in arms about this change. Something happened. We no longer care about device obsolescence. It's like our concept of ownership and longevity has been stripped from us.
You stream music instead of owning it, you download games instead of owning physical copies, devices are locked down, you can't run software you want, and we tolerate devices no longer working after a certain date.
It's okay if things stop working, because they weren't meant to work forever. It's sad.
> Ten years ago everyone would be up in arms about this change. Something happened. We no longer care about device obsolescence. It's like our concept of ownership and longevity has been stripped from us.
Broadly speaking, I absolutely agree. People are impressed that Apple supports 6-year-old iPhones, whereas I think that's an unconscionably short length of time. (Particularly given how Apple makes customers reliant on them for everything.)
However, in the case of these Kindles, I'm a bit more sympathetic to Amazon here. They're not the ones who are turning off 3G networks, so I'm not really sure what they could do.
And they're actually giving pretty reasonable promo codes.
For some reason, I didn't get one--probably because my device is no longer registered on Amazon.com. Not that I have any real reason to run out and buy a new Kindle anyway.
Well, that's not exactly what is happening here. Devices will still work after the internet connection stops, books will still be readable, and it will still be possible to load books through USB (or in some cases WiFi). The free cellular connection was an extra service that was clearly part of the sale pitch but I doubt most people who bought these expected that component to last forever.
Also, there is a clear reason they are turning these off (dropping on 2G and 3G coverage) as opposed to companies that needlessly brick devices just because they turned off a easy-to-maintain DRM server somewhere without an alternative recourse.
> Controversial HN opinion: ten years ago everyone would be up in arms about this change. Something happened. We no longer care about device obsolescence. It's like our concept of ownership and longevity has been stripped from us.
I don’t think this is true at all. Ten years ago, we had already gone through the analog to digital transition in a number of countries [1], obsoleting a lot of older television sets without the aid of a converter box.
In the US, TDMA and AMPS cellular networks were shut down by 2008 (TDMA shutdown started even earlier), obsoleting tons of early cellular phones, but also many phones from the early 2000s (again, TDMA). People were often given vouchers by carriers IIRC, since phones were largely subsidized by rate plans.
DIVX, a terrible DVD rental scheme that helped put Circuit City out of business, went under by 1999, leaving the devices essentially worthless (fortunately, most did receive a firmware update allowing them to be used as regular DVD players).
I’m sure there were some grumbles about some of this stuff (people were very mad about TV, even though converters were given away for free), but it is largely accepted that progress obsoletes certain technologies. This isn’t new.
TV updates coincided with the changeover to HD tv so I don't think people really cared - it ruined my portable since it had a builtin antenna, but that was that.
However there has been many more fights about turning of the FM signals, at least here in Denmark, mostly because people can't upgrade the radio in their cars easily but probably also because the new type of radio is a lot worse than FM. So now we have both.
I suspect that when/if they turn it of people won't get a new radio and will just play music from their phones.
Thank you for the comment. As a ham radio operator and radio junky in general I was wondering how the transition to all dab+ went for Denmark. Here in Austria we have both (more important and larger stations not receivable via dab though) and my car head unit has both. I find the sound of dab awful (to much compression and artefacts) and on fringe areas it pales compared to FM which will deteriorate in quality but still be continuously receivable. DAB just stutters. A real set back at least when used mobile.
They had planned to shut it down in 2019, but it has been postponed until 50% of listening was done digitally.
I still think the major issue is our cars, the fleet is old because there is an extremely high tax on cars, and it isn't as easy to just upgrade the radios as it used to be - and of course with FM available (and as you said, better in many cases) there is no big incentive to update, although we have more channels available on DAB.
Yeah, the timing of HD Radio coincided with the rise of smartphones/iPods/nascent streaming, so it didn’t really take off in the US (and there was never a huge reason to b/c the FCC didn’t shut off analog radio waves), but I do agree that if they cut off analog radio signal (or more accurately, if more stations moved to a pure digital format), some subset of users would complain (tho less as you said, thanks to phones), but that’s sort of my point: this obsolescence acceptance thing isn’t new, it’s how we’ve treated the changing nature of tech for decades. Yes, there might be fewer loud neckbeards who are irate online about it, but the fantasy that we used to all care a lot more about the longevity of devices and tech just isn’t true.
I'm pretty sure my first cell phones from the 90s and 00s won't work anymore because the networks no longer exist. I should get out the pitchforks and torches. I think there might not even be cellular network access for my first iPhone anymore.
In 2007, putting WiFi and cellular in the same radio stack was a real challenge. The iPhone was one of the first phones to have both radios in it — a handful of other devices did too, but it was really rare. Heck, I remember it took years for BlackBerry to successfully ship a phone with both 3G and WiFi (as opposed to having to choose between WiFi and 2G or only a 3G connection).
The big selling point of the first Kindle was the idea that you could access the store to download stuff anywhere. WiFi wasn’t ubiquitous like it is now (and even now, it isn’t as ubiquitous as I think we all would have hoped), which made having a free 2G connection really nice, especially when outdoors in areas that the E Ink display really shined.
Amazon was targeting book readers who may not have been computer users, so they wouldn't necessarily have Wifi (or any Internet) at home. The cellular connection (which was free and not dependent on any data plan of the user) allowed the user to purchase and download books, and so paid Amazon for the very small amount of data used given that a typical book is only a couple of megabytes.
Home broadband connectivity was only about 2/3 of where it was today. The iPhone was just rolling out.
As much to the point, Amazon was also very much aiming for the use case of the business traveler who wanted to buy a book before hopping on the plane in an airport that probably didn't have WiFi and almost certainly didn't have free WiFi.
I won't say 2007 was the stone ages. But a lot of things we mostly just take for granted today didn't exist or were relatively nascent.
It kind of made sense at the time. I have a Kindle DX, and that came out in 2009. Wifi was less ubiquitous and more terrible, and the idea with the Kindle anyways is you could be anywhere and buy a book, and it would just work.
It did open up some very interesting homebrew applications too!
Also the early models with WiFi had the absolute worst radios and constantly tripped over themselves. When I worked for Centurylink in/around 2011 one of the most common issues with wifi was Kindle devices. Thankfully most customers could figure that if their 3-5 other devices were connected and working, the issue was their Kindle, and not the CPE.
WiFi was pretty terrible for quite a while after it came out in general. I remember, in the early to mid 2000s, the Intel Developers Forums had desks set up to try to help press and analysts get, often plug-in PCMCIA card, WiFi working. And it was almost certain to fall over during general sessions anyway--well some things mostly don't change.
But if you actually needed a working network connection in the press room, you plugged an Ethernet cable into your laptop.
It was actually wonderful. My girlfriend at the time, now wife, had a grandmother who was an avid reader but didn't own a computer or have internet. They were able to get her to switch to a Kindle because of the cellular delivery feature. She was able to figure out how to buy stuff directly from the device, but I always thought it was neat how they could buy Grandma books and have the auto delivered to her a device.
The cellular was included with the device. I'd have to stretch my mind back but WiFi wasn't as ubiquitous, as easy to use, or as cheap to implement as today.
Don't know why but this reminds me of one support ticket on those things.
'i can not download any books'
'uh sir according to our data you are 10 miles off the coast of florida?'
'oh yeah I am on my boat'
'do you see any cell towers?'
'no'
'they need those to work'
'ohhhhh'
We were surprised that it even had enough signal to figure out the GPS cords.
Even back then cell coverage was not as good as it is now. So many times it was 'go stand at the end of your driveway and try'.
I pre-ordered the first Kindle and knowing that I could order a book from my airplane seat for a flight before they closed the cabin door was a huge gratifier for me!
"Amazon’s Kindle e-readers with built-in 3G will begin to lose the ability to connect to the internet on their own in the US in December, according to an email sent to customers on Wednesday. The change is due to mobile carriers transitioning from older 2G and 3G networking technology to newer 4G and 5G networks. For older Kindles without Wi-Fi, this change could mean not connecting to the internet at all."